• DOI:10.1353/TCC.0.0007
• Corpus ID: 68653154

A “Lasting Boon to All”: A Note on the Postal Romanization of Place Names, 1896–1949

@article{Harris2008AB,
  title={A “Lasting Boon to All”: A Note on the Postal Romanization of Place Names, 1896–1949},
  author={Lane J. Harris},
  journal={Twentieth-Century China},
  year={2008},
  volume={34},
  pages={109 - 96}
}

• L. J. Harris
• Published 1 November 2008
• Political Science
• Twentieth-Century China

Prior to the general acceptance of Hanyu pinyin (汉语拼音 ) as the governing transliteration system for Chinese in the mid-1980s, the Wade-Giles system predominated for fifty years except in the spelling of place names. Shortly after the establishment of the modern Imperial Post Office (大清郵政總局 Da Qing youzheng zongju) in 1896 it became the toponymic authority for the spelling of place names through its postal style romanization system (郵政式拼音 youzheng shi pinyin), which was carried on in the Republican era (1912-1949) by the Directorate General of Posts (郵政總局 Youzheng zongju). In the early twentieth century, then, Western scholars, cartographers, journalists, and foreign governments commonly employed Wade-Giles for general terms, but maintained Chinese postal spellings for place names. Upon opening its doors to the general public in 1897 the Imperial Post Office encountered mail matter addressed to and from foreigners living in China using a wide variety of transliteration systems. The dissimilarity in spellings resulted from the existence of numerous romanization systems representing local dialect pronunciations, transcriptions of different regional varieties of Mandarin (官話 guanhua), and Chinese orthoepy as interpreted through different European languages. The Imperial Post Office attempted to solve these transliteration problems by creating postal style romanization. Postal romanization eased the burden on postal clerks and ensured the prompt and correct delivery of mail matter by requiring the foreign public, overseas Chinese, and international postal patrons to adopt standardized postal spellings, thereby protecting the reputation of the Post Office. Creating the postal romanization system and establishing itself as the official toponymic authority, however, did not eliminate all of the thorny problems inherent in formulating an entire romanization system. The Post Office still had to decide among local pronunciations, a specific regional pronunciation of spoken Mandarin, and between orthographically English or